Put the Cut Into Cutie

Oh man, Punch the Clock. Man oh man. 

Listen, I love this record. I realize that’s not the most popular opinion among Elvis Costello fans. Coming after the lush complex bittersweetness of Imperial Bedroom, I can imagine it may have seemed like a bit of a disappointment. 

I arrived at Punch the Clock more than a decade after it came out, so I had no context for it other than the fact that it was another EC record. I did have one preexisting condition–a predilection for the work of producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who had also produced a bunch of other music I love, including classic singles from Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and They Might Be Giants’ terrific Flood album. 

Langer and Winstanley are versatile enough that they don’t have a “sound,” per se; they’ve done EC and TMBG but also Bush and Morrissey. However, my favorite Langer/Winstanley tracks do have a specific sound–it’s pop song as cut glass, sharp bits of instrumentation carefully set against one another into a perfect arrangement of pieces. They don’t hide accompaniment; there’s nothing buried in the mix. Yet it’s also clear where the ear should pay attention at all times. To borrow EC’s own lyric, their work is hot as a pistol, keen as a blade. Crystalline. 

Punch the Clock is a crisp, catchy pop album; it’s also highly political, with songs like “Shipbuilding” and “Pills and Soap” perhaps best known for their commentary on Thatcherism in Britain. “TKO (Boxing Day)” is another commentary, this one on the ways in which the ruling party manages to keep their boot firm on the throat of the people. The holiday has its foundations as a day for offering gifts to the poor; when “everyday will be Boxing Day,” it’s safe to say the rich and powerful will exert their maximum influence over the poor and weak. It’s a means of control baked into the foundations of government, culture, the economy; it’s the end game of capitalism. It was true in the early 80s and it’s true today.  

Today, the use of “Boxing Day” has a double meaning; the holiday is now better known as the UK equivalent of Black Friday in the US. (I’m assuming here that the Boxing Day discount phenomenon emerged after EC wrote the song in the early 80s, so it’s more of a retroactive application of meaning on my part.) With that in mind, the control takes on a whole new level, a “let them eat cake and buy cheaply-made inexpensive OLED televisions” attitude where the poor and weak aren’t just controlled, but exploited by consumerism as a way of creating constant diversion. TKO, indeed.